I got told that the gamecube doesnt support pixel shaders, and I've read some stuff that supports this, but I have seen a lot of great effects like, reflection and refraction, dynamic light and shadows, which as far as I know, are pixel shader effect.
So anybody thats programmed for the cube feel like clearing the air for me?
There's a great article about building pixel shader like things for the gamecube up on Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20021002/sauer_01.htm)...
Generally those effects don't require pixel shaders themselves, they can be done using conventional means too albeit they are far slower and take away processing power from the CPU that could be used for other things. This is all because shaders are just instructions executed on the GPU rather than the CPU...
I don't know anything about the gamecube, but those things don't need pixel shaders to be done - but they do need pixel shaders to be done accurately :)
Reflection is done with cubemapping, refraction too I guess, light and shadows can be done via light mapping or per-vertex, and shadows can be done with the stencil buffer or projective textures, or before that, projecting a mesh onto a plane (very simple, kinda dodgy).
Pixel shaders allow those tasks to be done per-pixel instead of being done per-vertex and interpolated, so the visible result it much more accurate.
Don't have time to elaborate, but that should help you out.